He is tenderly stroking a dead bird’s blue-black wing feathers with his long, fine fingers. “I picked this crow up on the road,” James Gillick tells me. “They’re a beautiful, beautiful creature, the crow.”

The bird is lying on a shelf with other objects – the flowers, the pears and the porcelain jugs that feature in the still lifes that have earned this 46-year-old figurative painter an international following.

We are in Gillick’s studio in the Lincolnshire market town of Louth.  In the centre of one of the studio’s three rooms is an easel that stands in a pool of light cast by the three glass panels above us in the roof.